The ABC allows comments on some of our articles, as a space for you to contribute your thoughts about news events and participate in civil conversations about topical issues.

All comments are moderated and we make no guarantees that your contribution will be published.

Reply

Author

Email

Date/Time

10 Dec 2016 4:10:34am

Text

PreviousMessage

"The critic David Bentley Hart caustically remarked that the New Atheism is "so intellectually and morally trivial" that it is best classified as merely another "form of light entertainment ..."

In fact, David Hart is an American Eastern Orthodox theologian whose main claim to fame is the extraordinarily poisonous rhetoric larding his attacks on those who disagree with his eccentric views.

For a taste of his vituperation, check out the article on the religious site "First Things" which is linked to Alister McGrath's article above (and from which Alister has borrowed most of his ideas).

Hart's insufferable superiority is apparently based on his conviction that no atheist has ever had the intelligence or courage to counter the following argument:

"... nothing contingent, composite, finite, temporal, complex, and mutable can account for its own existence, and that even an infinite series of such things can never be the source or ground of its own being, but must depend on some source of actuality beyond itself. Thus ... one very well may (and perhaps must) conclude that all things are sustained in being by an absolute plenitude of actuality, whose very essence is being as such ... the infinite act of being itself, the one eternal and transcendent source of all existence and knowledge, in which all finite being participates."

But nobody, apart from a handful of religious philosophers considers this ontological argument to be persuasive, let alone decisive.

Reality is not contingent. The universe is not a "thing". No "transcendent source" of reality is logically required. The abstractions "nothingness" and "non-existence" are mental constructs. Nobody can establish that the abstraction "nothingness" has any meaning outside a human brain. "Non-existence" is not the default state. And it is not at all implausible that the existence of the universe is unbounded by time, in fact, physics supports that line of reasoning.

Most theologians published on this site eventually betray their conviction that God is a non-physical SuperIntelligence filling all space-time. Yet all evidence points to the fact that "mind" is the activity of a physical organ - the brain. No structure capable of producing such a "supermind" is detectible - or plausible.

Some theologians, like Hart, suggest an ineffable "something" so attenuated and abstract that it is indistinguishable from nothing. Then they link that ineffable abstraction to the Bronze Age nonsense found in the Old and New Testament - as if their conception of God had some relationship with the primitive anthropomorphic concepts of God set out in those odd books.